


Prompt: You Must Not Die

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [116]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Death, Codependency, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Jewish Maximoffs, Pietro Has Issues, Pietro Has Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 19:29:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10815267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: Prompt: Wanda dies and Pietro becomes the unhealthily coping protector of the Barton children, to their initial delight and later concern.





	Prompt: You Must Not Die

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nanyoky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nanyoky/gifts).



> Written for a prompt on my tumblr, readable [Here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/160279221005/the-official-request-for-wanda-dies-and-pietro).

 

 **i.**  
When Wanda dies, Pietro… changes.

Wanda’s death had been a slow and painful thing, life eked out of her bit by bit with cancer and treatments. Her hands and joints horribly swollen, half blind where her scarlet glowed from her eyes, her very powers killing her.

“Why isn’t it killing me too?” Pietro had asked.

Doctor Cho had shown him the charts, shown him how he healed where Wanda did not. 

“Isn’t there anything I can do?” he had asked.

Blood transfusions he’d been told. _Maybe._  So they’d tried that, and bought Wanda a few more weeks of life.

“You mustn’t die,” Wanda had told him, and her hair was gone so he could not comb it, her fingers were swollen and painful so he could not hold her hands, and she was blind so he could not fix her gaze with his. He’d never felt so apart from his sister in all their days. “You _must not die.”_  Wanda’s tone was absolute. “This is _not_  you fault, I chose this for us, I chose powers, and this is _not your fault.”_

He did not notice he was crying until Wanda gave a hiss of pain and her swollen thumb brushed away a tear. 

“Pietro,” she had said, even around the pain. _“I forbid you from killing yourself.”_

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
She’d died two weeks later.

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
Pietro had sat empty in a hospital chair, had sat empty in the Synagogue, had sat empty at the base. 

“Hey,” Barton says softly, sitting beside him. “Kid. Come stay with us for a bit, get away from this. You can’t grieve forever.”

Can’t he? Everything he’d ever been was buried with Wanda, dead and gone.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
The Barton farm is…

It is not the base, nor the Synagogue, nor the hospital. It is not Sokovia either, and in some ways he is thankful for that, that it is not any of these things so clearly linked to Wanda - she who made them Avengers, who kept fragments of faith, who wasted away in a hospital bed. Who’d kept them safe in Sokovia by choosing their path.

He has no path any longer, without her.

“Oh, Pietro,” Laura Barton says when he walks in the door. “Thank God. Could you hold Nate for me a moment?”

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
He’d held Nathaniel Pietro Barton once before, but a few days after the child’s birth. 

“We’d like to name our son for you,” Barton had said. “You saved my life, I wouldn’t be here to see him if not for you. So we’d like to name him for you - middle name.”

He’d held the small child, eyes already as oddly, precisely alert as his father’s and felt Wanda’s hand squeeze his arm. He hadn’t been able to speak around the lump in his throat, but he’d nodded.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
Two weeks later Wanda had been diagnosed.

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
He’s gentle with Nate, shushing the baby and patient as he’s weaned onto baby food, rocking him to sleep when Laura and Clint are too exhausted with all else running their home requires.

It’s something to do, more than anything, and something Wanda would _want_ him to do - protect one named for him. So he does it.

He’s the one who wakes in the night when Nate cries and gets there before Laura with his speed. He’s the one who changes nappies or gets formula or baby food. He’s the one to burp Nate, and settle him back to sleep.

“Shoulda made you Godfather,” Clint comments one morning.

But he doesn’t believe any more, and even when he had it had not been in Clint’s God.

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
It’s something to do - something he _can_ do - and it is not surprising to him that before long he is helping the Barton’s other children just as much. It is something Wanda would want of him, after all - to protect children who need him, to pay back a debt owed by shelter offered.

When Laura stays at home to take care of Nate, when Clint is working on fixing the shingles and the children want to go to town and watch a film it is Pietro who takes them - one clinging to his back and one in his arms - and Pietro who watches over them.

It is Pietro who looms out of the shadows, a tall and gaunt protector, when someone would try to do them harm.

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
“Awesome!” Cooper says. 

“That was _neat,”_  says Lila.

It was simple, really. No matter what, he must not let these children come to harm.

 

* * *

 

 **x.**  
It’s nice, Lila thinks, to have Pietro around. They know he’s who their littlest brother is named for, and they know his sister died, but since arriving, she thinks, he’s doing better. He even plays with her and Coop sometimes, when he’s not taking care of Nate for Mom, and if Nate wakes up at night he quietens their little brother _very_  quickly.

And when they have nightmares he sings odd lullabies in another language, sitting by their beds and stroking their hair until they go back to sleep.

One evening, when she and Cooper are settling down for bed, Coop props himself up on his elbow, looks across the rug to where she’s reading the book of fairytales Mom gave her for her birthday.

“Lila,” Coop says. “Lila, I don’t think Pietro sleeps.”

 

* * *

 

 **xi.**  
Pietro rarely sleeps. He catches snatches of it in the wee hours of the morning when he knows the noise of the house will wake him before nightmares set in, or he sleeps on the swingseat on the veranda, Nate fast asleep balanced on his chest, always waking at half hour intervals to check on the baby.

He knows he’s looking more gaunt and tired - eating is a chore more than anything, these days, and it’s hard to motivate himself to do so when so much tastes like dust. He can’t even eat chocolate - Wanda’s favourite - because the memories quickly become too much.

So he rarely sleeps and barely eats and focusses on keeping the Barton children safe.

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
Lila bolts upright from a nightmare - Coop’s the one who screams, not her - and finds Pietro already blurring out of his blue at the doorway. 

“Are you all right?” he asks.

Lila looks around - soft blankets on her bed, the woven blanket hanging from the wall, the stacks of books at the foot of her bed and at Coop’s. Her brother is fast asleep in his bed - Mom’s promised they’re going to get their own rooms soon, once Dad’s finished fixing up the house, but until then they don’t _really_ mind sharing.

“I’m ok,” she says. “Are you?”

Pietro blinks, shakes his head slightly as though to clear his thoughts. He gives the briefest twitch of a smile. “I survive,” he says.

“Have you been sleeping much?” Lila asks. “Coop thinks you haven’t been. He thinks you look tired all the time.” Pietro stands, silent, in the doorway, a gaunt and looming shadow with pale blue eyes. Lila’s voice softens, quietens, grows small. “He’s worried. I think Mom and Dad are too.”

Pietro blinks again at that, and _again_  when Lila clicks the bedside light on. Cooper mumbles, rolls over, groans and sits up. 

 _“Lila,”_ he grumbles.

“Pietro hasn’t been sleeping,” she says.

Pietro looks mock-offended at her telling Coop that, but she doesn’t care. What she does care is the odd wounded look in his eye.

“Oh,” Cooper says. “Well that’s not good. Remember when Dad told us about falling asleep on stakeout and missing his target?”

Lila nods - Cooper has remembered their script perfectly. “You can’t take care of people if you don’t take care of yourself first.”

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.**  
Pietro almost wants to smile and he almost wants to cry. There is something of Wanda in this, the way these children are speaking, are trying to teach him a lesson - it’s a lesson Wanda had taught him slowly over years, and one he’s forgotten without her to enforce it. 

The sense of Wanda’s loss is like a gaping black hole, and he wants nothing more than to let go and sink into it’s nothingness. 

But he can’t. She forbade him and he promised.

“Come on,” Lila says. She’s sitting up and pushing her covers back. “You need sleep don’t you? Have my bed.”

Lila’s bed is very small, Pietro notes, and doubts he could fit in it. If he tried, he thinks his feet would dangle off the end.

“No,” he says gently - gentle as Wanda would want him to be, gentle as he would have been with Wanda. “Get some sleep. I will watch over you.”

The children glance to each other, the looks on their faces identical. _This grown up is an idiot,_  their expressions say, and Pietro remembers sharing that thought with Wanda.

 _“We_ are the children of _Hawkeye,”_  Lila says. _“We_  can keep watch over _you.”_

 _“And_  there’s two of us,” Cooper adds. “Mom always said that two heads are better than one. We can take turns.”

Lila crosses to him, her bare feet almost silent on the soft rug. Her hand is small in his. “Please?” she asks him, eyes big and imploring and sad and Pietro’s throat feels full of lead and sorrow at how much her expression mirrors what Wanda’s had once been.

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
The two let out the softest of sighs as Pietro quietly settles on Lila’s bed. Lila sits at the foot of Cooper’s keeping watch, Cooper buries his head under his pillow. “Wake me when you wanna sleep,” he mumbles - muffled - to Lila.

Lila switches out the lamp.

In the light of the moon, coming in from the window, Pietro’s eyes are pale and bright. 

“Sleep,” she says quietly. “We’ll keep watch over you.” Pietro blinks, but doesn’t close his eyes. In the dark the shadows beneath his eyes make his face look almost like a skull. “Do you want me to sing a lullaby? We started learning them in Music at school.”

Pietro falls asleep to a lullaby who’s word’s he’s never heard but a tune that he recognises.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments!


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